


Still

by BlackMamba



Category: Eureka
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:32:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackMamba/pseuds/BlackMamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nathan struggles to hold on to what he’s left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zeta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeta/gifts).



Nathan Stark was obsessed with time. He wanted to know what it was, not just theoretically but literally know what it was made of. He wanted to control it, to hold it in the palm of his hand, bend it backwards, forwards and ultimately to his will. Once he’d done that he’d be finished. With what exactly, he was never sure, but his entire life was a long scientific journey, one discovery toppling into the next, which he’d always assumed would end somewhere, because that’s what journeys did. But not before greatness. And what could be greater than making time stand still?

Now time is all he has. He is nowhere but everywhere, sliding between days, hours and moments like the ocean tide, surging and receding. And he can’t stay. That’s the worse of it; finding a moment or a day he wants that just slides away, too slippery to grasp. But he never stops trying. That much hasn’t changed. Nathan Stark never gives up on anything that matters. Not anymore.

\--

It takes him a moment to realize its Christmas. Allison never lights the tree until its dark out and he can see the sun has just faded into a deeply bruised purple. There are presents near his feet and wads of torn wrapping paper, probably Kevin’s from this morning. He always gets excited about seeing his name written on the tags.

“Jenna, you look adorable.”

She’s sitting on the couch, cradling his daughter in her arms. Nathan has only seen her once, a few hours after she was born. There was a crisis at Global and Allison had been trapped with Jack Carter of all people. Thankfully, he wasn’t the one who delivered the baby. Whatever existential force now responsible for Nathan’s presence would have crumbled in the face of that sort of mindfuck.

“Are you an elf? Santa’s helper this year?” Jenna is dressed in a red and green jumper with a small hat topped by a white puffy ball. It’s hideous and tacky, the sort of thing he’d have talked her out of if he was around. Well, he is around, but if he were corporeal and audible instead of bits of floating energy splitting time with spores and dust.

She’s beautiful. They both are.

“You forgot the bib.”

And there’s that voice, the one he swore would never be heard inside this house again once they were married. He’s wearing that stupid uniform in all its public servant glory with that dopy look on his face, the one that says _please talk slower. I don’t read good._

Carter hands her a bib, red and white striped like a candy cane, with the words “Sweet Stuff,” written on the front.

“Thank you Jack.”

Jack? It’s _Jack_ now?

\--

It’s their first Christmas together. Nathan watches this version of himself, smug in his belief that he knows every nook and cranny of his wife. After years of struggling to get by, three promotions in rapid succession have ensured a very different holiday this time around. Her gift is a diamond necklace, three carats, the center a pink stone that’s her favorite color.

Allison cries when she sees it. He barely has time to drape it around her neck before she turns around to kiss him, murmuring _thank you’s_ against his lips. They make love there, beneath the Christmas tree, like something out of one of those old movies where the guy actually deserves the pretty girl and nights like this go on forever.

It didn’t. Allison put the necklace away the next day and only took it out with prodding. He knows now that it was all wrong, too extravagant, nothing she’d wear on a regular basis. _But I loved the gesture,_ she’d tell him years later, after the divorce but before he’d lost her. _That you'd buy me something so beautiful._

\--

The world fractures and trembles, wavering between that moment and this one. It’s always like this, everyday, everyday his hold on the present is tenuous, slippery, like trying to hold an ice cube in the palm of your hand.

Allison is sitting at the dinner table with Carter at one side and Kevin on the other. Kevin is laughing at something Carter’s said and a sliver of jealousy knifes through his stomach. It took him years to earn that smile.

“So Zoe calls me and starts going on about how boring Bermuda is at Christmas time.”

“Oh poor baby.” Allison pouts with that dramatic, exaggerated pursing of her lips he always found sexy. Today is no expectation and Carter apparently agrees. It takes him a moment to continue the story.

“Yeah, well I told her to get over it. If she wanted to spend Christmas with me all she had to do was say so, but noooo.” Carter digs his fork into a mountain of mashed potatoes. “She’d rather slather on baby oil and drink out of a coconut.”

“You miss her.”

Nathan knows that tone. It means “I see you,” or “stop pretending because I’ve got you dead to rights.” She used it with him whenever he was working on something she disapproved of. Like the particle decelerator he’d helped design. The thing that killed him, she’d given him that look then.

“Yeah,” Carter says, because he’s picked up on it too. “I guess I do.”

Allison reaches out to touch his hand and the world fractures. Trembles.

Nathan’s gone.  
\--

It’s Christmas Eve. Nathan remembers this one because it’s been memorialized by a golden plaque hanging on his office wall. They’re standing backstage at a banquet hall, him in a tuxedo, Allison in a shimmering red gown. She’s helping him with his cufflinks, her lips pressed into a thin line.

“I can’t believe you’re still upset about this.”

Allison sighs and gives him that look, the one that says she’s caught him dead to rights. “If you didn’t want to spend Christmas with my family, you should have said so.”

This time he ignores it. Nathan watches himself, the older version with a shorter beard and overinflated sense of importance with weariness and disgust. _This is how you lose her_ he wants to yell. _Right here, right now, she's slipping away._

“Look, I didn’t ask them to plan a Christmas awards banquet. But it would have rude to turn them down. They only give one of these things out a year.”

“Nathan…”

“Allison.” He touches her arm. “This is what we worked for right? Moments like this?” He touches her hair. “They make it all worth it.”

Allison smiles, but now he can see that it doesn’t reach her eyes. Because there was no “we,” or “us,” that worked for any it. It was his work, his research, his face plastered on the cover of Time Magazine. And she knows it. Right there in her eyes, she’s screaming that he’s wrong. That he’s buried her somewhere.

“Alright.” The old him stops, meets her eyes for a moment and sees a glimmer of something, disquiet in her features. “With me Allie?”

It’s their language, the secret code of their marriage. “With me,” means, “are you still with me,” as in, “Are you okay? Are we okay? Just nod, so I can go on being an egotistical dickhead.”

“Of course,” she says, which is Allie speak for “I love you.”

The world fractures. Trembles.

Then he’s gone.  
\--

“It’s for your baseball cards.”

Nathan’s come back in the midst of a gift exchange. If he had a stomach it would be turning.

“Wow.” Carter lifts some sort of device that flips like the pages of a book when he presses a button. “So they go here?” He points to a small clear window. “How many does it hold?”

“All of them.”

Carter shakes his head. “I’ve got a lot of…” She gives him a look (sexy raised eyebrow) and his face slacks into that open mouthed dufus grin. “Seriously?”

“I had them make it for you in engineering.”

Nathan grimaces at her confession. They’d argued about it before, her using the most brilliant minds in the world to keep this dim bulb occupied. Toys R Us opened a store in the next town. How hard would it be to grab some Lincoln Logs or a Tonka truck?

Carter hands her a box, which she opens quickly, ripping the paper in half.

“It’s a Kindle.”

Allison looks down at her present with a soft smile. “I can see that.”

 _Tell him you know because you had the prototype seven years ago. Tell him that Global has intergrated the technology in the public library, along with digitized neurotransmissions that display images of the text while you flip the pages. Tell him to go read a damn book._

“I love it Jack, it’s really thoughtful.”

He hates this. He hates the way she placates this man because she’s brilliant, she’s too damn brilliant to waste her time (and that smile) on someone like Jack Carter.

“If you look here…” Carter points to the Kindle. “I added some books already.” He points to the bookshelf behind him. “All of those. Zane helped me work it. And Henry…” He clears his throat. “And uh…Fargo.”

Jackass.

“Oh.” She touches her lips with one hand. “This one…"1984", this was Nathan’s.”

Carter pauses. “Yeah, I know.”

Right. Someone like Jack Carter.

\--

“We have two choices Fargo. Either we trust Carter…or we don’t.”

He doesn’t want this day, this moment. But he keeps coming back here.

“Guys? We close?” Carter walks into the room, bruised and battered like a solider returned from battle. If what he says is true, that time is folding in on itself, he probably has.

“Yeah, this new clock should sync up with the accelerator…theoretically.”

Nathan watches himself on the day of his wedding, or what was supposed to be his second wedding to Allie. They were going to be happy. He’d woken up that morning sure of it. Fargo is working furiously on the particle decelerator, Nathan’s particle decelerator, or his technology at least, the monster that’s causing a rift in time.

“Start her up. If the seal holds we’ll accelerate the photon and time gets back to normal.”

 _It doesn't hold. Stop standing there hoping because you know it won't._

Nathan watches this version, the naive version of himself deflate as the glass cracks and the decelerator’s clock goes dark. Carter is standing beside him, oblivious as always to what he doesn’t understand. Nathan resents that too, the ignorance that allows him to hope, be a hero.

“We’ll do it manually.” Nathan steps inside the chamber which now looks like a tomb. This is where he dies, every time, an endless loop of how he failed her.

“I’ll do it,” Carter says. “Tell me what I need to know.”

For a moment, a brief second, he considers saying yes. It’s Carter’s job anyway, saving the town, jumping in front of trains and carrying babies from burning buildings. Nathan makes things, pulls them apart, and develops stronger Kevlar to keep the hero around a little longer. For a moment he bows to the natural order of things. But then he thinks of Allie.

“Are you sure?” Carter’s voice is softer, his ignorance fading as what’s about to happen slowly dawns. “What about Allie? What if you can’t…”

Nathan watches his own hands, steadier than they have any right to be, while he mouths off, deflects with some crack about his ego. Inside he’s panicking; going over the mistakes he’s made, tossing out everything that’s ever mattered with the blinding realization that this is his last day, his last moment, his last breath.

“Take care of her Carter. She’ll need you.”

His last breath.

“I’ll see you around Jack.”

\--

The world fractures. Trembles. And she’s alone.

Nathan sits down beside her as she stares at the Christmas tree. The wrapping paper that was strewn across the floor has been cleared away and a wineglass sits half empty on the coffee table. The edge is smeared with lipstick, a soft pink that’s faintly visible on her lips.

He wants to know if she’s okay. Nathan forms the words, knowing that she can’t hear and that they aren’t really words at all, just his will, petering out into nothing.

 _Are you still with me?_

If he was there she’d say “of course.” If she could hear him he’d tell her he was sorry for all of it, for before, for leaving, for believing his love would outlive time. He’d tell her that he gets it now, that’s its all too big, much, much too big for him to hold.

“Are you still with me?” Allison’s whisper might as well be a shout in the silent living room. Nathan forms the words that aren’t words, just his will, petering out into nothing.

“Always Allie.”

\--

He is nowhere but everywhere. Sliding between days, hours, moments, like the ocean tide surging and receding.

The world fractures. It trembles.

And then he’s gone.


End file.
